24th Atlantic Fringe Festival Shining on the Cosmos

‘Wagnerian’ sci-fi Tribe of One among 350 performances of 60 shows in four days of fringe

Mary Fay Coady is in one of two casts in Tribe of One, an experimental sci-fi play set in the Cadimus Protocol universe, written and directed by Michael McPhee of the Doppler Effect and running in the Museum of Natural History through Sept. 7 as part of the Atlantic Fringe Festival. (EMILY JEWER)

Michael McPhee is reaching for the stars at the Atlantic Fringe Festival.

His new sci-fi play Tribe of One is “a really crazy, overly ambitious project,” he says, talking rapidly in a phone interview before Thursday night’s opening. “It’s ended up being Wagnerian.”

The epic play, about a psychopath who is, in fact, necessary to society, is set in an alternate universe and has two different casts, interactive “super computers” and Nicholas Bottomley’s projections on the giant globe in the Science on a Sphere Room at the Museum of Natural History.

“I saw that room and I thought this room is incredible.”

The 80-minute drama by the Doppler Effect is part of the independent Halifax theatre company’s new interactive, transmedia project, Cadimus Protocol, that was launched online Aug. 21 and will culminate in a December production of the play The Contribution.

For the Cadimus Protocol universe McPhee developed a new but comprehensible vernacular language that is gender neutral so Tribe of One, which is partly “about the idea of happiness versus meaning in life,” has two alternating four-member casts of local actors, the Alpha and the Omega casts. For people who see it twice, “our perception of gender changes the piece.”

McPhee, a fringe regular, says the festival is “a chance to experiment” and a time to present high-quality work to attract new audiences.

“There’s a whole section of people who don’t go to theatre who go to the fringe. It’s got to be gold standard work.”

While the Doppler Effect keeps using the fringe to “push the envelope,” the festival is giving Halifax author-artist-activist Jane Kansas a chance to realize her own funeral in My Funeral: the dry run, a one-woman show with mourners appearing by video at (((Parentheses))) Gallery.

Kansas, who turned 60 in June, volunteers at the Gottingen Street gallery and is having a 50-year retrospective going back to kindergarten drawings on view to Sept. 14.

She had always wanted to do a show for the fringe but never had “an idea I had a vision for.” But this March, at McDonald’s, she mentioned to friends, including fellow playwright Lee-Anne Poole, that she had always thought about her own funeral.

“Lee-Anne said, ‘Why don’t you do it now?’ Something pinged in my brain. I saw it in Parenthesis, I saw it would be a practice run. I saw it would be funny and not a Debbie Downer experience.

“There are some anecdotes and stories from my life involving death, my parents’ deaths and my sister Ellen, who dropped dead in February on her 54th birthday,” says Kansas. “Sometimes when I’m trying to recite the lines I’m tearing up and other times it’s very funny.”

The fringe is a homecoming for Dartmouth-born, Toronto-based writer, clown, actor and creativity coach Jim Dalling who hasn’t been in the Atlantic Fringe for 10 years, but was a regular with Jackie Torrens, Michael Best and Rob Plowman.

He brings his much-toured, award-winning, all-ages show, Loki’s Big Dream, to the province for his first time.

The story of a boy and his grandfather, it is inspired by his relationship with his grandfather Ellis Webber, who had a campground in Lake Charlotte on the Eastern Shore and drove a truck.

“When people ask me why I became a performer it goes back to high school and my grandfather, who died of cancer. He came to see me in a play at Prince Andrew High School and I made him laugh and it was as if the laughter transformed him. He seemed healthy. For years, whenever I was nervous, I imagined my grandfather in the audience.

In the end of Loki’s Big Dream, “the audience finds out the dream is to transform people’s lives through laughter.”

Dalling, a 42-year-old father of two, loves the Atlantic Fringe Festival. “I’ve had such a history with it. I wanted to connect with people back home and I have a lot of friends out here who have children.”

The fringe is a chance for Halifax actor Lita Llewellyn to produce her first play, inspired by her experience volunteering with mentally ill patients at the Nova Scotia Hospital.

Ida and Daisy looks at the impact of schizophrenia on two sisters living in rural Nova Scotia in 1953, the year Halifax pioneered the use of the French drug chlorpromazine to treat schizophrenia in Canada.

“Mental illness has become such an open discussion but we don’t talk about the families or the caregivers,” says Llewellyn. “We don’t understand the impact of what these aggressive illnesses are doing to them.”

Llewellyn plays Ida, who has put her life on hold for her sister Daisy (Margaret Smith), suffering from undiagnosed schizophrenia. The two are on their own trying to run the family farm and face the stigma and difficulty of Daisy’s illness. “Will the two of them get through it or will it break them apart?”

Llewellyn, co-directing with Maurlea Austin of LunaSea Theatre, has faced her own fears to premiere her first play. “It’s scary and wild but it’s been a lot of fun and I’ve had amazing peopple around me to help.

“The fringe gang with Lee-Anne Poole, Thom Fitzgerald and Kevin Kindred, they’re so great and open and work hard to make the festival what it is. I think people coming to the festival will be treated to a lot of wonderful, wonderful work.”

ATLANTIC FRINGE FESTIVAL

WHEN: Thursday to Sept. 7

WHAT: 350 performances of 60 shows, including drama, comedy, dance and magic from Nova Scotia, Canada and the U.S. Half the shows are billed as comedy, 20 are Canadian touring productions, three are about mental illness and one is about Canadian history. All shows in Halifax.

RETURNING ACTS: Bill Wood and Rhys Bevan-John, Ned Petrie and the Panel Show, Jessica Kitzpatrick (whose Cupidity was a 2013 hit), Cabaret Serpentine, Ian Mullan, the Doppler Effect and the Fringe Talk Show with Kevin Kindred, and remounts of Lee-Anne Poole’s Country Song and director Thom Fitzgerald’s 2012 production of Bryden MacDonald’s Whale Riding Weather, for which Hugh Thompson won the Merritt for best actor.

•The is a sampler performance Thursday, 7 p.m., at Neptune Studio Theatre with a one-minute excerpt from nearly every show.